Perfect for Family Literacy Nights and as an Online Resource for Parents

Research-based and developed with reading specialists, Bruce Johnson, M.Ed., and Dorothy Taguchi, Ph.D.

To help promote parent engagement in reading with their children, we have created several interactive presentations or “workshops,” which we are making available for download or streaming at no cost to schools and districts. If you or a person in your organization would like to do the presentations yourself, we provide everything you need in the download: there are PowerPoint Presentations, Handouts for the participants, and comprehensive Presenter’s Guides. Or, if you’d prefer, there are two streaming videos available, which you are welcome to use at any time for teachers or parents in your district.

All of the downloadable workshop presentations can be easily tailored to your audience and desired length of time. And, while these presentations are primarily designed for parents, they can also be great workshops for classroom teachers and literacy tutors!

There are two versions of the Reading Together workshop presentation available as a streaming video. You can stream the videos from this page or from YouTube. More information on this is below.

Reading Together
and
We Both Read®

These two mini-workshop presentations (30 to 45 minutes each) will motivate parents to get more involved in reading with their children and teach them skills they can use to maximize the benefits of reading together.

The first workshop covers best practices in reading together. Parents will learn why reading together is important, three styles of reading together (choral reading, echo reading, and shared reading), skills to use when reading to their child, and skills to use when their child is reading to them.

The second workshop covers books specifically designed for reading together, focusing primarily on use of the We Both Read series. This section includes information on how to maximize the benefits of using We Both Read and offers parents an opportunity to practice using the books.

View and download Reading Together and We Both Read presentation materials

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Starting Off Right with
Phonemic Awareness
and Phonics

For presentations to parents, there are two mini-workshops, one focusing on phonemic awareness and one focusing on phonics skills (Length: about 45 minutes to 1 hour each). A longer and more comprehensive version, combining both workshops, is included for presentation to classroom teachers and teachers’ aides.

The phonemic awareness presentation focuses on verbal games and activities parents can do to help prepare their children for reading. Parents will learn how to help their child develop the ability to hear, identify, segment, and blend the individual sounds in spoken words.

The phonics presentation focuses on the relationship between sounds and letters and how to blend letter sounds together to decode written words. Parents will learn simple games and activities they can do anytime with their child to reinforce phonics skills in reading.

View and download Phonemic Awareness and Phonics presentation materials

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Helping Your Child
Get Ready to Read

This interactive presentation is designed to let parents know what they can do to help their children be better prepared for reading instruction. An ideal time to present this in the first half of kindergarten or before formal reading instruction begins.

The first section of the presentation focuses on reading to your child, as well as fun activities to do with your child to help develop phonemic awareness. The workshop presentation not only shows how important it is to read to your child but also covers how parents can maximize the benefits for their child.

The second section of the presentation includes fun activities to help your child learn the names and sounds of the letters in the alphabet. It also includes how parents can begin to introduce reading together activities, even with children who are prereaders.

Each section can be presented in about 30 minutes. Please note that much of the material in this presentation is covered in the other two workshop presentations above. However, this presentation is tailored specifically to parents of prereaders.

View and download the Helping Your Child Get Ready to Read presentation materials

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